The Bobrov Affair: Creating a Graphic Novel Adaptation of a “Lost” Russian-Empire Crime Novel

Abstract

This chapter presents and discusses an ongoing project of adaptation and cultural translation. The source-text is a Russian-language novella: Tri suda, ili Ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball] (1876). I am the translator, writer and illustrator of the graphic novel adaptation of this work, which is commissioned by the project “Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts to New Media” led by Dr Claire Whitehead (University of St Andrews), and which will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2024, under the title The Russian Detective. The chief “red herring” to which my title refers is the idea of a stable source text on which ideas of “authenticity” or accuracy depend. The source text is not well known and has not previously been translated. It is also incomplete, narratively inconsistent and digressive, and the physical text itself is incomplete. The unstable status of the source text allows me to make connections to the wider contemporaneous literary and social context of which it was a part. I have done this in a number of ways, the main one of which is by introducing a key plot-twist involving incest between the murderer and her brother/father. While this narrative strand is not present in the original text, it speaks to a far wider context in which father-daughter incest was a commonplace of Russian nineteenth-century crime fiction. I also resist the presumption of accuracy in the artwork by using anachronistic paratextual symbols (e.g. period dress, ersatz censors’ stamps, records, and other marginalia) in order to invite reflection on the created nature of the world depicted. I conclude that the graphic novel enables new forms of knowledge about the literary and socio-political contexts of its source material, and through which a range of assumptions about the period and genre can be challenged.